was so refined that you could slash your wrist on his chiseled cheekbone, and his eyes were so blue you’d bet the Vineyard compound that they were colored contacts. If a New Yorker cartoonist were commissioned to create a caricature of his perfect visage, it would be the artistic equivalent of shooting a fish in a barrel: too easy. He was almost too handsome, too perfect. Not that he was ridiculous like Gaston in Disney’s Beauty and the Beast , overmuscled with Leno’s chin and beefy ’roidy chest. No, his handsome beauty, innocent and cold, was like a child’s, gripping and hypnotic. When Chase walked into Waverly Inn or Da Silvano, everyone—from Graydon to Anna to countless celebs—turned to look at him. Even tourists who didn’t know who he was wondered, “Who’s that?” sensing instantly he was at least B List.
Like JFK Junior before him, this scion of a world-renowned, prominent political family had been in the public eye since a very young age. His attractive, popular maternal grandfather, Price Hutton DuPree, had been a United States senator, ambassador to the Court of St. James, and then head of the United Nations. His mother, Brooke DuPree Lydon, had married his father, Grant Lydon, in a grand society wedding at the University Club in Haute Couture, chronicled in Vogue . Brooke was a Hitchcock blonde, picture perfect, pulled together and full of pronouncements, be they political (“I’m to the right of Mussolini and proud!”) or fashion-related (“People over ten who wear Crocs should be executed.”). Brooke had three sisters (Paige, Blair, and Lynne) and followed in her family’s tradition of curt, monosyllabic names for her three sons: Price, Pierce, and Chase. The four DuPree girls had been blond photogenic catnip for the press, waving beside their parents at the Republican convention or riding their thoroughbreds in Millbrook, and now so were Brooke’s three sons. They were constantly snapped by shutterbugs—on the beach in Massachusetts or at a polo match in the Hamptons or at a black-tie ball on New York’s benefit circuit.
Truth be told, Chase didn’t really care for the air-kissing scene of Manhattan’s elite. He had been educated at Buckley, Groton, Princeton, and Harvard Business School, with classmates at each institution whose family names were synonymous with those on the Fortune 500. But while he had never cared about any of that crap, and even sometimes wanted to bag some of these sometimes twice-weekly rituals, Chase was dutiful. He was the model son who never got into trouble at school (whereas Price has been expelled from Andover and spent his senior year at a public school in Southampton, near the family estate). And forget about the entitled generation: Chase exhibited what his mother, Brooke, called “the work ethic of a Filipino,” laboring for his family firm till all hours, while Pierce had been “between jobs” for six years (read: does jack shit). Both of his brothers rolled in the proverbial hay with blond tits-on-sticks with head shots and their own Web sites who may have shimmied by a greased pole or two, and had names that ended in the letter i , the classy nomenclature kiss of death. But good Chase dated a shining star of Mayflower descent on par with the DuPree Lydon pedigree: Liesel van Delft. No Brandis or Candis for him.
Yet as the years passed, the union that would have had his forefather’s fossils cheering from their cobwebbed graves, all was not well. Though it was a sunlit, romantic courtship, by twenty-eight, Chase and Liesel were coasting on a cross between love and inertia.
“Sweetie,” Liesel said one night as they undressed for bed. “I feel like you don’t even notice my new matching lingerie. I splurged at La Perla and you barely looked up.”
“Oh, it’s beautiful, honey. I’m so sorry, I’m just, I have a splitting headache.”
“I have seventeen sets of perfect matchy-matchy sexy stuff. I even went for this magenta set, and
Like JFK Junior before him, this scion of a world-renowned, prominent political family had been in the public eye since a very young age. His attractive, popular maternal grandfather, Price Hutton DuPree, had been a United States senator, ambassador to the Court of St. James, and then head of the United Nations. His mother, Brooke DuPree Lydon, had married his father, Grant Lydon, in a grand society wedding at the University Club in Haute Couture, chronicled in Vogue . Brooke was a Hitchcock blonde, picture perfect, pulled together and full of pronouncements, be they political (“I’m to the right of Mussolini and proud!”) or fashion-related (“People over ten who wear Crocs should be executed.”). Brooke had three sisters (Paige, Blair, and Lynne) and followed in her family’s tradition of curt, monosyllabic names for her three sons: Price, Pierce, and Chase. The four DuPree girls had been blond photogenic catnip for the press, waving beside their parents at the Republican convention or riding their thoroughbreds in Millbrook, and now so were Brooke’s three sons. They were constantly snapped by shutterbugs—on the beach in Massachusetts or at a polo match in the Hamptons or at a black-tie ball on New York’s benefit circuit.
Truth be told, Chase didn’t really care for the air-kissing scene of Manhattan’s elite. He had been educated at Buckley, Groton, Princeton, and Harvard Business School, with classmates at each institution whose family names were synonymous with those on the Fortune 500. But while he had never cared about any of that crap, and even sometimes wanted to bag some of these sometimes twice-weekly rituals, Chase was dutiful. He was the model son who never got into trouble at school (whereas Price has been expelled from Andover and spent his senior year at a public school in Southampton, near the family estate). And forget about the entitled generation: Chase exhibited what his mother, Brooke, called “the work ethic of a Filipino,” laboring for his family firm till all hours, while Pierce had been “between jobs” for six years (read: does jack shit). Both of his brothers rolled in the proverbial hay with blond tits-on-sticks with head shots and their own Web sites who may have shimmied by a greased pole or two, and had names that ended in the letter i , the classy nomenclature kiss of death. But good Chase dated a shining star of Mayflower descent on par with the DuPree Lydon pedigree: Liesel van Delft. No Brandis or Candis for him.
Yet as the years passed, the union that would have had his forefather’s fossils cheering from their cobwebbed graves, all was not well. Though it was a sunlit, romantic courtship, by twenty-eight, Chase and Liesel were coasting on a cross between love and inertia.
“Sweetie,” Liesel said one night as they undressed for bed. “I feel like you don’t even notice my new matching lingerie. I splurged at La Perla and you barely looked up.”
“Oh, it’s beautiful, honey. I’m so sorry, I’m just, I have a splitting headache.”
“I have seventeen sets of perfect matchy-matchy sexy stuff. I even went for this magenta set, and
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